To-Morrow, William Faulkner
To-Morrow
UNCLE GAVIN HAD not always been county attorney. But the time when he had not been was more than twenty years ago and it had lasted for such a short period that only the old men remembered it, and even some of them did not. Because in that time he had had but one case.
He was a young man then, twenty-eight, only a year out of the state-university law school where, at grandfather’s instigation, he had gone after his return from Harvard and Heidelberg; and he had taken the case voluntarily, persuaded grandfather to let him handle it alone, which grandfather did, because everyone believed the trial would be a mere formality.
So he tried the case. Years afterward he still said it was the only case, either as a private defender or a public prosecutor, in which he was convinced that right and justice were on his side, that he ever lost.
Actually he did not lose it — a mistrial in the fall court term, an acquittal in the following spring term — the defendant a solid, well-to-do farmer, husband and father, too, named Bookwright, from a section called Frenchman’s Bend in the remote southeastern corner of the county; the victim a swaggering bravo calling himself Buck Thorpe and called Bucksnort by the other young men whom he had subjugated with his fists during the three years he had been in Frenchman’s Bend; kinless, who had appeared overnight from nowhere, a brawler, a gambler, known to be a distiller of illicit whiskey and caught once on the road to Memphis with a small drove of stolen cattle, which the owner promptly identified. He had a bill of sale for them, but none in the country knew the name signed to it.
And the story itself was old and unoriginal enough: The country girl of seventeen, her imagination fired by the swagger and the prowess and the daring and the glib tongue; the father who tried to reason with her and got exactly as far as parents usually do in such cases; then the interdiction, the forbidden door, the inevitable elopement at midnight; and at four o’clock the next morning Bookwright waked Will Varner, the justice of the peace and the chief officer of the district, and handed Varner his pistol and said, ‘I have come to surrender.
I killed Thorpe two hours ago.’ And a neighbor named Quick, who was first on the scene, found the half-drawn pistol in Thorpe’s hand; and a week after the brief account was printed in the Memphis papers, a woman appeared in Frenchman’s Bend who claimed to be Thorpe’s wife, and with a wedding license to prove it, trying to claim what money or property he might have left.
I can remember the surprise that the grand jury even found a true bill; when the clerk read the indictment, the betting was twenty to one that the jury would not be out ten minutes.
The district attorney even conducted the case through an assistant, and it did not take an hour to submit all the evidence. Then Uncle Gavin rose, and I remember how he looked at the jury — the eleven farmers and storekeepers and the twelfth man, who was to ruin his case — a farmer, too, a thin man, small, with thin gray hair and that appearance of hill farmers — at once frail and work-worn, yet curiously imperishable — who seem to become old men at fifty and then become invincible to time.
Uncle Gavin’s voice was quiet, almost monotonous, not ranting as criminal-court trials had taught us to expect; only the words were a little different from the ones he would use in later years. But even then, although he had been talking to them for only a year, he could already talk so that all the people in our country — the Negroes, the hill people, the rich flatland plantation owners — understood what he said.
‘All of us in this country, the South, have been taught from birth a few things which we hold to above all else. One of the first of these — not the best; just one of the first — is that only a life can pay for the life it takes; that the one death is only half complete. If that is so, then we could have saved both these lives by stopping this defendant before he left his house that night; we could have saved at least one of them, even if we had had to take this defendant’s life from him in order to stop him. Only we didn’t know in time.
And that’s what I am talking about — not about the dead man and his character and the morality of the act he was engaged in; not about self-defense, whether or not this defendant was justified in forcing the issue to the point of taking life, but about us who are not dead and what we don’t know — about all of us, human beings who at bottom want to do right, want not to harm others; human beings with all the complexity of human passions and feelings and beliefs, in the accepting or rejecting of which we had no choice, trying to do the best we can with them or despite them — this defendant, another human being with that same complexity of passions and instincts and beliefs, faced by a problem — the inevitable misery of his child who, with the headstrong folly of youth — again that same old complexity which she, too, did not ask to inherit — was incapable of her own preservation — and solved that problem to the best of his ability and beliefs, asking help of no one, and then abode by his decision and his act.’
He sat down. The district attorney’s assistant merely rose and bowed to the court and sat down again. The jury went out and we didn’t even leave the room. Even the judge didn’t retire. And I remember the long breath, something, which went through the room when the clock hand above the bench passed the ten-minute mark and then passed the half-hour mark, and the judge beckoned a bailiff and whispered to him, and the bailiff went out and returned and whispered to the judge, and the judge rose and banged his gavel and recessed the court.
I hurried home and ate my dinner and hurried back to town. The office was empty. Even grandfather, who took his nap after dinner, regardless of who hung and who didn’t, returned first; after three o’clock then, and the whole town knew now that Uncle Gavin’s jury was hung by one man, eleven to one for acquittal; then Uncle Gavin came in fast, and grandfather said, ‘Well, Gavin, at least you stopped talking in time to hang just your jury and not your client.’
‘That’s right, sir,’ Uncle Gavin said. Because he was looking at me with his bright eyes, his thin, quick face, his wild hair already beginning to turn white. ‘Come here, Chick,’ he said. ‘I need you for a Infinite.’
‘Ask Judge Frazier to allow you to retract your oration, then let Charley sum up for you,’ grandfather said. But we were outside then, on the stairs, Uncle Gavin stopping halfway down, so that we stood exactly halfway from anywhere, his hand on my shoulder, his eyes brighter and intenter than ever. This is not cricket,’ he said. ‘But justice is accomplished lots of times by methods that won’t bear looking at. They have moved the jury to the back room in Mrs. Rouncewell’s boardinghouse. The room right opposite that mulberry tree. If you could get into the back yard without anybody seeing you, and be careful when you climb the tree—’
Nobody saw me. But I could look through the windy mulberry leaves into the room, and see and hear, both — the nine angry and disgusted men sprawled in chairs at the far end of the room; Mr. Holland, the foreman, and another man standing in front of the chair in which the little, worn, dried-out hill man sat. His name was Fentry. I remembered all their names, because Uncle Gavin said that to be a successful lawyer and politician in our country you did not need a silver tongue nor even an intelligence; you needed only an infallible memory for names. But I would have remembered his name anyway, because it was Stonewall Jackson — Stonewall Jackson Fentry.
‘Don’t you admit that he was running off with Bookwright’s seventeen-year-old daughter?’ Mr. Holland said. ‘Don’t you admit that he had a pistol in his hand when they found him? Don’t you admit that he wasn’t hardly buried before that woman turned up and proved she was already his wife? Don’t you admit that he was not only no-good but dangerous, and that if it hadn’t been Bookwright, sooner or later somebody else would have had to, and mat Bookwright was just unlucky?’
‘Yes,’ Fentry said.
Then what do you want?’ Mr. Holland said. ‘What do you want?’
‘I can’t help it,’ Fentry said. ‘I ain’t going to vote Mr. Bookwright free.’
And he didn’t. And that afternoon Judge Frazier discharged the jury and set the case for retrial in the next term of court; and the next morning Uncle Gavin came for me before I had finished breakfast.
‘Tell your mother we might be gone overnight,’ he said. ‘Tell her I promise not to let you get either shot, snake-bit or surfeited with soda pop…. Because I’ve got to know,’ he said. We were driving fast now, out the
